First off—I want to thank you all so much for the overwhelmingly kind responses on our Kitchen Reveal last week. We put so much time and energy into this room and we're like proud parents, so it feels great to know that so many of you are following along and are enjoying watching this house unfold! I wish I could invite you all over for dinner & drinks to celebrate :)

Update: to those who requested wider angle shots for the before and afters, I just updated my last post with new photos—scroll to the bottom of the Reveal Post to check them out!

I mentioned in the beginning that this wasn't going to be a budget makeover. We did that in our Florida house, but I didn't want to hold back this time. With that said, we still DIY'd as much of it as we could and shopped around for the best deals (of course), so we could have spent a lot more.

I kept a spreadsheet and tried to be as diligent as I could about recording every purchase, but over the course of five months, contractors working on different parts of the house and lumping labor charges together, and countless trips to Lowe's for miscellaneous items, this is definitely not an exact dollar amount.

I also didn't include things like pillows, dishes, plants, and accessories that aren't kitchen specific and could be repurposed elsewhere. It becomes a gray area when you get into decorative items—where do you draw the line?

GRAND TOTAL: $28,481Again, this number is really just an estimate, but even if you add in every little thing we could have possibly forgot about, it's still definitely under 30k. And I'm pretty confident we added more than that in value to the house considering we got a great deal for the neighborhood. It really pays off to buy a house that needs some TLC!

Once again, here are the project links which go into detail about each phase if you'd like to learn more about how it all came together:

If I missed anything or you still have questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the comments!

So what do you think? Was the total more or less than you expected, or right on the mark? Imagine if we had hired out everything instead... yikes! I can easily see how the average kitchen remodel is over $50k. Glad we got the most expensive room in the house out of the way. Now we can focus on the other 2100 square feet... one project at a time!

I've got a fun giveaway coming up in the next post—you won't want to miss it!